


Yard Duty

by Jessa



Series: Multi-chapter WIPS [3]
Category: FinnReylogan, Reylogan - Fandom
Genre: Clyde is sweet AF, Explicit Language, F/M, Finn likes to cook jollof, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, HEA, I really don't mean to slur teachers I just am one that's all, Luke is a bit of an arsehole but he means well, M/M, Multi, Rey is learning some social skills, Reylogan, Star Wars/Logan Lucky/Mary Shelley crossover (go with it), Student-teacher/Groundsman AU, depression and anxiety, minor references to happy families (Rey is jealous), tags will change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-08-23 01:00:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16608848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jessa/pseuds/Jessa
Summary: Rey is a student-teacher, about to embark on her final teaching round, and Clyde is a groundsman at her placement school. Neither are very happy in their lives until today, when their paths unexpectedly cross.





	1. Early on Monday

**Author's Note:**

> I just had this really weird idea one night recently when I couldn't sleep, and it's resulted in this... I will post a few installments and see where it goes... It's early days yet but read the tags and please let me know what you think! I think I will be venting a whole bunch of stuff about work that I'm currently frustrated by here, in this little fic, over the course of it... lol
> 
> Thanks to the people in the two-halves-of-reylo discord group for talking through ideas with me for this fic. I really appreciate the time and brainpower x

Very reluctantly Rey rolls out of bed. She is a morning person, she _is._ She’s just not _this_ morning’s person, having been up until 4:30 am with her laptop on her knee, curled up in the armchair and wrecking her eyesight in the otherwise darkness of the lounge, practising the voice she’ll use: deep, not high and pitchy. High and pitchy just makes them resent you, or so all her lecturers say in class; kids want you to sound like a man, not a woman. Deep and like some kind of authority.

Had that been said by a lecturer? Or her last supervising teacher? Rey’s not quite sure as she staggers into the bathroom, turns on the water and steps into the bath; it’s a shower over bath. She’s left the light off in the bathroom; she can’t face bright lights just yet. She rehearses the opening line again:

“Renaissance Art was characterised by its… _fuck.”_

Rey's petulant foot stamps against the aged surface of the flaky porcelain in frustration. She's been trying to cram them all night, the lines from the presentation her supervising teacher sent her, which she has to deliver today to a class she hasn't even met yet. Rey mourns the fact that she never sits down in this bath, and wishes for the umpteenth time that she could. Wishes she could get over the fear of the flakes working loose and then working their way nightmarishly inside her vulva, that would not be pleasant. Or hygienic. She shudders. Maybe if she could just relax inside a warm, drawn bubble-bath, seated on a smooth, slippery, seamless surface on a regular basis - like every morning, or every evening, or even both - she’d be a lot more ready to cope with stress at times like this.

 _You need to make it sound more student-friendly, be casual, use their language,_ she thinks to herself.

“So,” she recites aloud again, “Renaissance Art was _the shit…”_

_The shit? You lame idiot, that’s not in the PowerPoint, don’t wander too far from the script._

She rinses the lather of the shampoo from her hair. Why is she even washing it anyway? It’s already 6:58 and the bus will arrive at 7:32. If she can catch that one she’ll be at the station by 7:47, and that will give her ten minutes to walk up the hill to the high school.

 _Wait,_ she thinks to herself, scrabbling at her hair with the towel to dry it quickly now she’s washed and out of the shower. _That might not be enough time, you should round that up. Fifteen minutes. You need fifteen minutes to walk up that hill, you don’t want to arrive there sweaty. No one likes a teacher who smells. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to walk up the hill and then because you took your time you definitely won’t arrive there sweaty, or smelly. No kid wants to smell your BO._

“Shit,” she cusses again.

That means leaving home earlier. She’d planned to straighten her hair today, on her very first day of her final teaching round, but fuck it. She doesn’t have time for that kind of superficial bullshit now. She’ll just have to pull it back on the bus, half-up and fixed with an elastic. That’ll do. She can _not_ be late today.

Rey opens the dryer and pulls out all the clothes. It had been nice of Finn to install the tumbler on the wall above the washing machine, but really, in a pinch, the wall is a completely impractical location for such a frequently used whitegood. Finn’s taller than Rey for a start, and she can’t quite see inside, so she always has to resort to this washing-vomit situation on the floor of the bathroom, and then deal with the chaos of the subsequent rummage through it in order to locate her clean dry clothes.

Eventually she’s pulling on briefs and a sports bra. Then she pelts the short distance back to her room, already knowing well what she’ll wear; she’d meticulously planned her outfit last night, and pre-hung the clothes on the inside handle of the bedroom door before she went to bed; a black Kmart dress that had cost ten dollars but looked really good - it had a V-neck front and this pink frilly thing sewn inside so it looked like a nice shirt underneath, but it was actually just a bit of filmy and synthetic material sewn in like an afterthought, and she hated it, but it looked really professional - and elasticised Mary-Janes on her feet. Her favourite shoes.

As Rey wriggles inside the cheaply-made fabric of the dress, pulling the length down to her bare knees before giving her clothed body a very quick glance of appraisal in the mirrored wardrobe doors, Rey reminds herself that she will never actually work for a private school. She's resolute. Those are for yuppies and posers. And this outfit is also for a yuppy. And a poser. And she already knows she looks like a dick in a dress. And as she stands there, in front of the mock glass and studying her own reflection, that thought - not self-deprecating at all but entirely and wholly just simply  _true_ \- is completely reinforced.

 _Fuck this,_ she thinks in derision as her brain comes to its senses, and she wrenches the dress from her body. _Just wear pants._

Hurriedly she pulls on the tailored grey pinstripes she wore to her last placement school - they still fit because she’s fanatical about exercise; every afternoon for forty minutes at 4:00 pm - then she rummages through the hanging clothes ‘til she finds a white fitted shirt, fumbles the buttons but gets it done and grabs her grey V-neck jumper with the three-quarter sleeves. Finally she slips on her shoes, not bothering to straighten the crossed elastics, she’s not got time. She raps loud on the door of Finn’s room as she flies past it.

“Bye!”

Rey listens, but he doesn’t respond. He must still be asleep, which is fine; he’s got a lot going on and they can talk later. Shouldering the strap of her red pleather bag, already packed with her laptop and lunch, she flies out the door of the apartment.

“Wallet, phone, keys,” she says below her breath, as she looks down at them in her hand, her usual leaving-house ritual. Then Rey closes the door, stuffs the wallet and keys into her bag but holds on to the phone.

7:24 am.

 _That’s fine,_ she thinks. _I'll make it._


	2. First Impressions

It’s one of those double entrances. You need to go through one set of doors first and then for no apparent reason you also need to go through another. And it’s not for reasons you can easily understand, or probably ever understand; after all this is a school, and Rey doesn’t have a wealth of experience yet but she has picked up a few things. Just enough by now on prior rounds to begin to understand that the halls of education don’t always lead you down well-trodden paths to logic.

But this door situation is definitely not here for reasons of hygiene, surely, because it’s not like this is a doctor’s surgery or a cafe or even that thing Matt Damon has to live inside in that movie where he gets stranded on Mars. Although _that_ is definitely an enclave that is actually the difference between you living and dying, so maybe that one _is_ different. That one is saving your life.

 _The Hab,_ Rey remembers, as she pulls at the first door.

“You need to push that.”

When she looks up for the source of the voice there are two things Rey notices about the person stood behind her, leaning in and reaching for the frame of the outer door to help her push it open. And she’s not sure why she does but she does step aside and let him help. There’s just something about him that makes her want to allow him to do it. She is definitely not the type to let men do things for her, least of all strange men and even lesser of all strange men opening doors, something she can do perfectly well alone. But maybe that’s the third thing she notices now about him.

The first had been that: _that_ he’s a man. And that had also been the second thing, that he’s a _man._ And he’s also very tall - the fourth thing she noticed, after the third thing - and as she looks into his face now she catches the tawny colour of his eyes. That must be the fifth thing. And her heart does a little thing of its own that makes her feel disproportionately cross at him, and that’s the very final first impression Rey gets: just how much he annoys her already and he’s only said five words.

“After you,” the man with the tawny eyes says, still holding open the door for her.

 _Make that seven,_ Rey corrects.

She’s too cross to thank him. She just brushes by his outstretched, overalled arm and walks through the gap to the purposeless space between the first and second sets of doors that lead to the foyer of the school’s Main Reception.

“That one you will need to pull,” the overalled man with the tawny eyes says from behind her, as Rey pushes her weight against the inner door _._

“What?” she mumbles, ruffling as she stares impatiently down at the sign which is indeed clearly marked  _pull_ and which is also apparently clearly defying all kinds of sense, just like this senseless little space between the doors in which they are both half-jammed because by now Rey has begun to pull the door towards herself, but he’s also entered the space behind; she can feel him lightly pressed against her back, so neither of them can go either forwards or backwards. “Honestly, how _ridiculous…”_

There’s some sort of clatter - Rey can’t see what it is, but he must’ve shifted something because now he’s stepping back, and she has room to step back too and open the damn thing at last and walk through. The overalled man follows her in, a hand trolley by his side stacked with an awkward assortment of boxes she's only just seen; he and the trolley have traversed both doorways completely sans her help.

A feeling Rey loathes, one that shits her to tears, starts to gnaw at her insides, catching her completely off-guard, another things she hates - typically Rey never feels remorseful or underprepared for anything - but there’s something about him that calls it all up in her, or the former thing at least, and in very large doses: guilt. She turns awkwardly, unsure of what to do next because he’s already through the second door; he no longer needs help, if he ever did. But it no longer matters because she’s missed the chance to help him anyway, and now she just looks like a total...

 _“Fuck,”_ she gasps, as her shin hits something hard-edged and definitely not there a moment ago.

Pain shoots through her shinbone but that’s not the half of it.

Somehow until this point Rey and the overalled man with the tawny eyes have managed to enter the foyer unnoticed. Now several people - all the people - are looking up and at least one of them sits with a student in uniform, clearly a parent. And they are all staring open-mouthed as Rey rubs furiously at her shin, mouthing the beginnings of a string of other cusses she’d like to voice just as loudly as the first and certainly would if she were anywhere else but here. She glares at the roomful of people.

“Well, _honestly,_ who put that  _there?”_ she huffs into the very awkward silence that’s arresting the foyer, the pain in her shin so intense she’s breathless.

“I did,” the overalled man says.

If looks could kill he wouldn’t have much longer. Rey begins to stare a flaming hole right through him, still rubbing at her shin. Each time she presses down on the emergent lump her chest aches from the pain shooting from the place where the fore of her lower leg’s just connected with a stack of folded exam tables. The overalled man with the tawny eyes just stares back. He's infuriatingly calm.

“Are you okay?” he asks her, motioning to the leg she still has gripped in a silent display of agony. “The Health Centre’s just next door, I could go get you an ice pack. If you wanted.”

“I’m really fine, it’s just a bump,” she says, through gritted teeth.

Rey lets go of her leg and sets it down on the maroon-coloured floor of the foyer of Main Reception. Somehow she manages to straighten up. He’s still looking at her and at that moment the scent of the foyer hits, like air when you vacuum carpet. And suddenly the room seems very warm.

“I’d have remembered it if you’d’ve been in the grounds before,” he says in a low voice, but just loud enough for Rey to hear and completely ignoring the looks they’re still getting as they stand by the door, waiting for the receptionist to acknowledge them; she seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time talking into the mouthpiece of her headset for someone who’s supposed to be managing a roomful of waiting people. “You here to see someone?”

There’s something about him that’s very deliberate, and also a little bit delicious.

 _What the fuck?_ she thinks to herself. _You are here to teach children, you are not here to think about how delicious..._

“My name is Clyde,” he says.

Rey blinks and opens her mouth.

“Rey Shelley?” the receptionist calls, finally off the phone. “Here from the university?"

“That’s right,” Rey answers.

“Wait there, I’ll let him know you’re here.”

“Okay, thank you,” she says.

Rey looks back at the man who says his name is Clyde. He isn't exactly smiling. Well, not with his mouth. But as she looks longer maybe there is a trace of something there, but just in his tawny eyes.

“You here to stay?”

The room seems very warm again.

“I’m just a student-teacher,” Rey answers. “So, I guess I’m just passing through.”

Clyde just stands there quietly, tall as fuck and looking calmly back while Rey keeps looking at him quizzically, the pain in her leg just a dull ache now really as they wait together, paused in the foyer of Main Reception.


	3. Recess

Schools are full of people. They’re also really fucking isolating places and sure, maybe Rey is just an outsider here and these sudden feelings of loneliness are nothing more than that: feelings. Moods that are very most likely far removed from reality, the products of a thoroughly warped perception of what’s really going on and a perception she can’t really help if she’s kind enough to allow her brain to think about it all like that, and give herself a tiny break she doesn’t give herself very often from the perils and the pitfalls of self-critical thinking.

But still, when it happens - when she starts to feel blue - it catches Rey off-guard, and that doesn’t happen often, either. She typically never lets emotions pull her down, but maybe that’s the operative word: _lets_. Because it’s not like they’re not there, those feelings. They are.

 _You’ve got to be your own best friend,_ Rey reminds, blinking back tears as she stares at her reflection in the mirror above the tiny basin in the only female bathroom in this building. _Or you won’t even last until lunchtime, and you need to._

Rey’s very aware she doesn’t work here. She’s very aware she’s not really yet a teacher and she sure as shit’s not getting paid to do any of this. But she’s not a kid either. Much more than just a student. She’s not a student at all, really, she’s more like a volunteer. Yes, that’s what she is: a volunteer. She knows things, she can do things, she’s just not formally trained to do them. It’s all very strange, and it all feels very temporary. Like waiting.

She pumps the soap dispenser three times in rapid succession, then gives it a fourth for good measure.

Finn pretends he gets it but how could he really, and she certainly doesn’t blame him for _not_ getting it. It’s not his fault. He wants to understand. They’ve been through all this before - rounds - and he’s always very supportive, especially of her terrible moods. Rey wishes that he was here now, it would be nice to hear his voice. She contemplates calling him, just to hear his voice.

 _But he’s probably still asleep,_ she admonishes. _And really, what would you even say?_

In the mirror above the under-sized basin Rey gives herself a grin that she hitches. If she were a marionette there would be strings attached to the corners of the smile she sees on her own face now. Her eyes begin to grow warm again so she breaks the gaze she has with her own reversal and instead she rubs her palms together briskly, creating a frothy lather with the hand soap that smells nothing like vanilla, although she suspects it’s meant to as she hooks her thumb beneath the handle of the mixer tap and pulls up to start the flow of water.

The symbolic meaning of this action is not lost on Rey as she rinses her hands then drops the edge of one to the handle and shunts it south, shutting off the stream. She stares once more at her face in the mirror; her skin is shiny already and now the lids of her eyes are puffy, too. She taps her still wet fingertips to her face, beneath her lower lids first then around her cheeks and nose and across her forehead. Finally she reaches for the paper towel dispenser, pulls down a sheet and pats herself dry.

 _Time to get back,_ she supposes, grimly. _You’ve been in here far longer than’s credible._

Rey exits the bathroom with five minutes left of recess. Maybe it would be nice to spend a little time outside until the bell. Clear her head. Get some fresh air. She descends the short flight of stairs to the most southern entrance of the building. The automatic doors slide open and she exits, and when she rounds the corner she almost walks straight into the blade.

 _“Shit,”_ she wheezes, choking on the heart that’s now in her mouth and where it remains as she catches sight of Clyde.

“Well,” he mutters, “Don’t go comin’ ‘round corners so fast, Rey Shelley, if you don’t want to get frightened.”

Rey gives him a very perturbed huff. He lowers the blade of the cordless chainsaw and then a pair of headband earmuffs.

“You’re saying it’s _my_ fault I nearly ran straight into that?” she asks, incredulous as she glares at him hard. “Don’t _do_ things like that directly around corners then, where someone _could_ run into… _that._ Fucking hell.”

He looks back at her.

“You seem angry,” Clyde says eventually, still studying Rey.

“Well, I’m _not.”_

He turns to study the topiary tree he’s plainly been shaping if she pieces together the visual evidence, including the surely excessively-sized piece of equipment he’s using to shape it with. And rather badly.

“You have an interesting name,” Clyde says.

“And what do you mean by that?” Rey tests, still glaring and assuming he's still talking to her, even though he remains engrossed in his poorly-executed work.

 _“Ray._ That’s a boy’s name. _Shelly._ That’s a girl’s name. Interesting.”

Is he simple? She suspects he might be. Rey softens her expression to a frown and supposes she shouldn’t be rude, even though she’s still annoyed by how much he bothers her and also even though he’s almost just sliced off half her face unwittingly with a chainsaw blade. He _had_ offered her an ice-pack earlier when her shin hit the tables in the foyer of Main Reception. He did seem... kind. And he still looked... delicious. Perhaps a _little_ bit of patience wouldn’t kill her...

Because maybe it is high time she opened up to someone other than just Finn. Broadened her horizons. Got to know someone else, too. And at least just _tried_ to make a new friend here because maybe if she could do that, if she could just take a shot at a proper conversation with somebody here at this school, then everything here on this round might get easier, because it hasn't really started very well...

 _You can do this,_ she thinks, as she takes a deep breath.

“That’s not my name,” Rey says. “Or… Well... It is, but… It’s _Rey_. Not the boy’s name _Ray_ , it’s R- _e_ -y. And then my last name... Well, that's  _Shelley,_ with an _e_ as well, two _e’_ s. So, that’s not really a girl’s name either, I don’t think, and so neither of those names are boys' names or girls' names. They’re just names. They're  _my_ names.”

As she’s been speaking, Clyde has returned to looking at her.

“Like the author, then?” he asks, now she’s finished.

“What?”

“Like the author, then,” he repeats.

“The _author?”_ she queries, puzzled.

“Yes,” Clyde says. “The writer what wrote that book about the monster.”

She’d definitely been starting to think he was simple but this didn’t fit that at all. Clyde turns his attention back to the topiary tree.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Clyde says, inspecting his dubious work again. “And it’s okay, you don’t have to talk to me. You can just go back to flying ‘round corners, you’re all too busy for me, anyway. But I’m used to that.”

He returns the muffs to his ears, rips the chainsaw and she notices his left hand, and as she does the bell for the end of recess sounds and Rey turns automatically to walk away from Clyde.

And then for some reason, that maybe has something to do with everything that’s happened so far this morning - her inability to be decisive when she dressed at home before she left, her clumsiness inside the foyer, her near-emotional breakdown in the bathroom just now and then just before that, during Sessions 1 and 2, when she’d fucked up all the lines from the stupid PowerPoint and all the kids had sniggered at her and her supervising teacher had just sat there at the back of the classroom and let it all just happen - for some reason Rey turns around and she walks back towards Clyde, and he cuts the chainsaw and lowers the muffs again and he looks at her. And then he just listens.

“My supervising teacher here is an arsehole,” Rey starts. “And I don’t really know if things will improve by lunchtime but I don’t know anyone else here except him, and now you… I mean, I just spent most of recess hiding in the toilet, apart from talking to you obviously, but… I have no idea how I’m going to spend 55 minutes of lunchtime after the next two lessons I have to take, or where I’m going to spend them… My supervisor just locks himself away in his office whenever he's not supervising me while I teach... I guess that’s exactly what my last one did too, quite frankly. _She_ didn’t really have much time for me, either, so maybe it's _my_ fault… Maybe _I'm_ the one who's doing something wrong...”

“You wanna eat lunch together?”

There’s a lump in Rey’s throat, so she just nods but Clyde sees it, because he’s still studying her carefully.

“Okay then, Rey Shelley,” he says quietly, turning his gaze back to the poorly-shaped tree. “At lunchtime, I’ll come find you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for making Clyde a bad topiarist, but his calling is not maintenance and I promise to make him most excellent at other things, some of which we haven't yet seen on film.


	4. Proper Teachers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke gets some lines and Clyde has something to say about that…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note in case anyone isn’t familiar with the term ‘Sharpie’ which is a brand of permanent marker that does genuinely smell *really* really good. 'Bum bag' = 'fanny pack', but it's the same degree of unflattering regardless of which term you know it as.
> 
> And sorry for so much time between updates. Thanks for the support for this fic, it’s really helped me get another couple of chapters together. There'll be another one following this one fairly soon with more Clyde, promise! Hope you enjoy <3

When the bell sounds at last for the end of Session 4, after stuffing her laptop back inside her red pleather bag Rey goes straight to lunch, virtually skipping down the stairs to the southern entrance of the building to wait for Clyde, where she last saw him. Two hours ago at the end of recess.

It’s bright outside. Rey shields her eyes with one hand and squints into the car park in search of him. The sleek Audis and swank Minis vie for her attention as her sight adjusts and she begins to notice things that aren’t altogether unfamiliar about the signature possessions of proper teachers: their cars.

For a start they actually have them and they look very nice; proper teachers’ cars never seem run-down, patched-up or broken. And Rey’s less sure how she feels about proper teachers themselves in general now that it’s lunchtime, and things have improved a little since recess - she’s still erring on the side of _pack of arseholes_ though, because her supervisor has definitely not improved since recess - but she hasn’t changed her mind about proper teachers’ cars.

Rey loves their cars. And she doesn’t love much, so that’s saying quite a lot, but she would go as far as to apply that degree of affection here to this example for sure, and to anything with an engine really, because for some strange reason Rey’s always savoured the smell of petrol. It reminds her of permanent markers. And for some strange reason she’s always savoured the smell of those, too.

 _Sharpies,_ Rey exacts in her head, as her gaze drifts to the rear of the Lexus that’s not much more than a stone’s throw away. _Sharpies are the best smell. And they smell just like..._

In the lower left-hand corner of the SUV’s rear windscreen are stickers of stick figures that very vaguely resemble a balding man gripping the handle of a lawnmower, a woman with a perm raising a glass of wine, and three half-sized and mercifully gender-neutral things that Rey supposes are meant to be their children. And finally, stuck there fast to the glass, there’s a dog with a bone in its mouth. Rey stares at the bone until movement catches the corner of her still-yearning eye.

 _...Cars,_ Rey finishes, as she looks beyond the Lexus to the source of the movement in the far corner of the car park.

Clyde is there, leaning back against the side of a UTV with a grass green paint job and cadmium yellow detailing, and he’s in the middle of stretching out his big overalled arms across the welded frame of the vehicle’s hood. Rey notices his left hand again, and the fact he’s still really fucking tall, as tall as he was at recess. He’s staring back at her intensely and, like his height, that stare is definitely also just as fucking delicious as it was at...

“I did _not_ give you permission to go to lunch.”

Rey jumps a mile. She’s well aware who’s there, without the need to look. So with an unmatched reluctance she pulls her eyes from Clyde, who’s halfway across the car park by now and although she would very much rather continue to watch him lumber the rest of the way towards her, instead she turns to face Luke, who's sporting a very unflattering fluorescent orange vest that he definitely wasn't wearing earlier. 

“But it’s _lunchtime,”_ Rey appeals to her supervisor, noticing the matching bum bag he's also now got slung around his waist, with _First Aid_ scrawled across one edge. “And I assumed that at _lunchtime_ I could at least…”

 _“Never assume,”_ Luke lectures. “You’re a _student,_ Rey, and around here you can’t just vanish whenever you feel like it. You’re not registered to teach so I need to know exactly where you are at all times. And if I don’t then I can’t teach you.”

“You’re not allowed to just _ditch_ me,” Rey exclaims, shocked by the revelation that this teaching round could end by some other means than her own choice to end it. “You’re supposed to be my _supervisor._ And don’t _threaten_ me, thank you _very_ much. You’re not allowed to do that either. I know all about what you're allowed and are _not_ allowed to do, so don't you dare...”

”Don’t _you_ dare do it again,” Luke drubs, pointing his finger at her chest. “You need to listen if you want to do well. I keep trying to explain that to you but you don’t seem very willing to learn. Today, and _every_  working day after that for the next three weeks, Rey, while you're here you need to do everything that I do when I do it. And right now I’m on Yard Duty. So that means you need to come with me.”

“But...”

“That’s _exactly_ what I’m talking about. _Don’t argue._ Just shut up and do what I do, will you? It’s not hard. Come on. Follow me.”

Luke starts walking up the path towards the northern entrance.

“Well, when do I get to eat lunch?” Rey asks, as after a moment she gets over the shock of being reprimanded by someone other than herself, and hurries to catch up to Luke.

“You can eat while we walk, just like I do,” he says, pulling out a thermos with a clear straw attached and beginning to suck something bitty and green through it.

Rey wrinkles her nose, completely appalled by the sight of what borderline-elderly men apparently consume for lunch, but nevertheless still hungry. She thinks mournfully of her own lunch, still inside her bag.

Finn had made jollof for dinner last night and even though they’d eaten nearly all of it then, there’d been some left over. And it was fine to eat jollof cold, it was actually pretty good, but she hadn’t brought a fork from home. She hadn’t thought she’d need one, schools always have staff kitchens. But it's up on the top floor, outside Luke’s office, and earlier she thought she could easily just take Clyde up there with her to get one, but there's no chance of meeting up with him now, surely. Let alone of even eating lunch. Because how in the hell is she going to eat a rice-based dish without a fork while walking?

As _that_ thought arrives, Rey becomes aware that Luke is still lecturing.

“...Or after this duty is over. It only goes for twenty-five minutes, and then the rest of the time is yours. Although you may want to spend some of it preparing for Sessions 5 and...”

“Excuse me, sir?”

Rey and Luke both turn and Rey stares open-mouthed in a kind of disbelieving torpor.

She assumed that Clyde had looked the other way as soon as Luke had begun to reprimand her. That he'd returned to his UTV. Maybe gone to eat lunch alone, perhaps finally realising then that she wasn’t worth much. She’d been wondering how long it would take him, actually, and to a degree surprised he even kept his word to find her at all.

But he hasn’t done that. In fact, by the evidence here, he’s followed her all the way up the path. And all of a sudden the words he spoke to her at recess return. And the kindness he showed her after listening so patiently as she vomited out all the frustration and self-hatred inside herself at the fact that all she really wants here is to find some way to fit in. To be accepted. Even if only for an hour over lunch.

Clyde opens his mouth once more and Rey starts to listen, just as intently as he had to her at recess. And to her complete and utter shock, so does Luke.

“Sir, you need to take that back...”


End file.
